Distinction between music you play and music you listen
to yes, my god, yes. This is a great framework for
my discussion of music in LA, where ‘played’ music takes a backseat to
‘listened music,’ even among players. Dominance of the visual, the spectacle.
Yes.

Played (“practical”) music is more physical, ergo sensual.
Traces to aristocracy, then bourgeoisie, then guitar pop. Needs to read Attali, learn that practical music is the root
of all music.

Passive music has become the music, thanks to radio,
concerts, records.

Amateur/first actor >>> interpreter >>>
technician

Beethoven = prototype of Artist who changes over time,
struggles with himself to find ‘truth’

The function of Beethoven is to render amateurs unable to
play music – not because they lack the skill, but because they lack the code
and the resources. Beethoven is orchestral, and the player can only see himself
as a conductor. This is very important –
ideology of structure contained within aesthetics. Beethoven implies hierarchy,
professionalism, organization, etc.

Later Beethoven (after deafness) turns to an aesthetic that
requires reading, structural thought. This is also practical music in a
sense, but the praxis it leads us to desire is utopian, and unattainable. Whoa.

THE GRAIN OF THE VOICE (1972)

Language is bad at interpreting music. It can only be
described through the use of adjectives, because it has no subject.

Focus on the “grain” of a voice, that aspect of expression
where the voice and language meet.

Determined to move beyond value judgments (I like vs. I
don’t like) through focusing on physical relationships to singers, as
instantiated in the grains of their voices this
is an elegant, if unconvincing, solution to the value problem in music.

Barthes’ ‘grain’ is similar to Braxton’s ‘itness’ I think –
in that it can be perceived but not codified.

Grain exists in instrumental music as well, and renders
traditional genre distinctions largely irrelevant. Another route around genre. Wow, he hits the value problem
and the genre problem in one fell swoop.

Quotes

“Pythagorean space has been somewhat repressed . . . thus is
founded – against music (against the text) – representation” (69)

“How could art, in a society that has not yet found peace,
cease to be metaphysical? that is,
significant, readable, representational? fetishist? When are we to have music,
the Text?” (77)

“the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of
the Author” (148)

“There are two musics (at least so I have always thought):
the music one listens to, the music one plays. These two musics are two totally
different arts, each with its own history, its own sociology, its own
aesthetics, its own erotic; the same composer can be minor if you listen to
him, tremendous if you play him (even badly)” (149)

“the body as inscriber and not just transmitter, simple
receiver” (149)

professional musicians today = “the technician, who relieves
the listener of all activity, even by procuration, and abolishes in the sphere
of music the very notion of doing.” (150)

“the fundamental code of the West, tonality” (152)

“rather than trying to change directly the language on
music, it would be better to change the music object itself, as it presents
itself to discourse” (180) that’s audacious.

“the ‘grain’ is that: the materiality of the body speaking
its mother tongue” (182)

pheno-song: “everything in the performance which is
in the service of communication, representation, expression . . .” (182)

geno-song: “having nothing to do with communication,
representation (of feelings), expression . . . where melody explores how the
language works and identifies with that work” (182)

“the whole of musical pedagogy teaches not the culture of
the ‘grain’ of the voice but the emotive modes of its delivery” (183)

“what is produced at the level of the geno-song is finally
writing” (185)

“the ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand
as it writes, the limb as it performs” (188) this is a pretty good song lyric.

"under the pressure of the mass long-playing record, there seems to be a flattening out of technique" (189) technology >>> aesthetics